gwax's rumblings

I have been think­ing on the mat­ter of what to name my new server quite a bit lately and have found it to be the most dif­fi­cult parts of set­ting up my new com­puter. I believe, how­ever, that I have finally set­tled on a name. The list of runner-ups is as fol­lows (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• abyss
• hobozero
• tacosquid
• cephalo­pod
• sack­fist
• mon­key­glove
• gluttonous-slim
• tzar-king-rex
• hobo-overload
• ralph
• pants
• el-boot
• your-mom
• noth­ing
• e-hobo
• thor-the-bumhammer
• leonard
• spat­ula
• rizza
• cun­ty­bones

In the end, all of these pos­si­ble names have lost out to hobosphere. All glory be unto the hobosphere.

Sometimes the pix­els on an LCD can become stuck, dis­play­ing only some col­ors or appear­ing com­pletely dead. These black or oddly col­ored spots are a pain in the neck but they’re not always per­ma­nent. At some point last sum­mer the Mac lap­top I was work­ing on got a stuck pixel and after scour­ing the inter­net for infor­ma­tion on how to fix such things I came across instruc­tions for fix­ing stuck pix­els on the PSP that involved play­ing a par­tic­u­lar video file, con­tain­ing RGB pulses, and mas­sag­ing the screen around the stuck pixel. The PSP tech­nique worked fan­tas­ti­cally and in a few moments my screen was free of stuck pix­els. I have a sim­i­lar prob­lem on the machine I’m using right now but this machine has no means of play­ing .mp4 files (which the PSP pixel fix­ing video is) and rather than try­ing to fig­ure out how to make it play .mp4 files, I thought I’d ImageMagick myself up a quick solu­tion. To that end, I cre­ated three ani­mated gifs that pulse at dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies (rgb3.gif, rgb5.gif and rgb7.gif), which serve the same pur­pose as the video and are sub­stan­tially smaller in size (1.2KB vs 1.5MB). The great thing about these is they’re essen­tially plat­form inde­pen­dant and require no video codecs at all. To fix your dead pix­els, just fire up a graph­i­cal web browser, point your­self at one of the images, move the browser win­dow so that the image is under your dead pixel, mas­sage the screen a lit­tle and with luck the pixel may start work­ing again. If you don’t have any luck try one of the other fre­quen­cies and if that doesn’t work, I’m sorry.

UPDATE: If you’re here, you might be inter­ested in Unsticking Stuck LCD Pixels: A Script

As I expect is rather clear, I use Mozilla Firefox as my pri­mary web browser. Now, Firefox, has a pretty solid sys­tem for adding exten­sions and there are rather a few that I use and like, so I thought that I’d let you folks in on my per­sonal pref­er­ences in Firefox Extensions. I’ve orga­nized them in the seem­ingly non­sen­si­cal way that my Firefox’s exten­sion man­ager has, so you’ll have to wade through the minor ones as well as the really keen ones.

• BetterSearch — gives me thumb­nails in search pages, kind of nice though not par­tic­u­larly useful
• mozcc — puts cre­ative com­mons license infor­ma­tion in my sta­tus­bar, not impor­tant but kind of nice to know sometimes
• Popup ALT Attribute — gives me a lit­tle popup bub­ble of the ALT text when I mouse over an image; really nice to have sometimes
• IE Tab — allows inter­net explorer to be embed­ded in a tab; this is unbe­liev­ably keen some­times and means I don’t ever have to open inter­net explorer
• Live HTTP Headers — allows me to watch and mod­ify head­ers; lets me pull some inter­est­ing chi­canery sometimes
• Fasterfox — uses some hacks to make Firefox load pages faster
• Dict — select a word and look it up with dict
• Extended Statusbar — Adds a lot of infor­ma­tion about page load­ing to my sta­tus­bar, another keen but not so func­tional extension
• Tab Mix Plus — adds mul­ti­ple tab rows, adds tab reorder­ing, adds mid­dle click to close, adds a bunch of other stuff; this exten­sion enhances tabbed brows­ing by an order of mag­ni­tude and I con­sider it com­pletely indispensible
• Firesomething — changes the browser’s name in the title­bar; I love this exten­sion and really hope they hurry up and make it com­pat­i­ble with Firefox 1.5 soon
• Disable Targets For Downloads — pre­vents empty win­dows from being opened for down­loads, which gets rid of a mod­er­ate annoyance
• Viamatic foX­pose — adds a but­ton to your sta­tus­bar, which when pressed, gives you a win­dow with thumb­nails of all your tabs; really keen
• Flashblock — replaces flash with a place­holder that you can click to enable indi­vid­ual flash ele­ments; indis­pen­si­ble if, like me, you hate 95% of flash but still want to use it occasionally
• Open Source in Tab — in case it wasn’t appar­ent yet, I like tabbed brows­ing, this lets me view page sources with­out hav­ing to deal with a new window
• ChatZilla — an IRC client built on Firefox; it’s a clean and decent client, serves my needs (I’ve been IRCing a bit of late)
• FireFTP — an FTP client built on Firefox; gives me more FTP func­tion­al­ity when I need it
• Download Statusbar — puts the down­load man­ager in my sta­tus­bar (I use the mini configuration)